I don’t read Yelp; the very word puts me off. Many people including my best sons think I should do that and many of my colleagues do so. But if you have been reading these essays for a while you know that I encourage customers to complain directly to me. And you do:             “…at […]

“You have a problem and it’s up to you to figure it out,” a customer said to me. She’s right and I am trying. She was sitting at one of our tables on a Saturday morning, the busiest single time of the week for us and she had two computers open in front of her. […]

I was a management consultant many years ago, a partner in a firm that specialized in data processing consultation.   I learned nothing from my partners about their specialty but I did like how they responded (privately) to the complaints of their clients. GIGO. Garbage in; Garbage out. I have thought about GIGO frequently over the […]

I was a new and passionate baseball fan in 1949 and fell in love with a movie called It Happens Every Spring, Ray Milland, Jean Peters, and Paul Douglas. It was the story of a professor who accidentally invents a potion that repels wood and becomes a pitching phenomenon for the St. Louis Browns baseball […]

In July 1990, Marvelous Market opened and was a nearly instant success. Just nine months later Uptown Bakers opened in Cleveland Park and not too long after that Baker’s Place joined us and began to open stores very quickly. Then Marvelous Market’s first baker left and opened Firehook in Alexandria. For a moment it appeared […]

Back in the ‘90s I knew someone who owned a delicatessen on the east side of Manhattan. He was very successful, his store always crowded as food places can be in New York, Paris, and San Francisco. My friend had what seemed to me then a novel way of pricing his foods. He always made […]

My mother died this week a few months before her 105th birthday.  That she was so old suggests who she was. We have said for years that what kept her alive was overwhelming cheeriness and her determination to live; but others, most people, frequently said to me, “You must have great genes.” And indeed my […]

If I wanted to do so, I could go every few months to a food show. These are expos held in municipal convention centers, generally in New York or Chicago or San Francisco. They can be very big like the show put on each May by the National Restaurant Association. Or they can be specialized […]

I don’t permit tipping at Bread Furst and now am wondering whether my opposition to it can be justified. For me this is an aesthetic issue and I take my lesson from what I have experienced as a customer: I order at the counter from a young woman in torn jeans and a wrinkled and […]

I proposed recently to the owners of Politics and Prose that we collaborate in selling a list of my favorite cookbooks. For any who don’t know, Politics and Prose, a half-mile from Bread Furst and 30 years old, is one of the most successful independent bookstores in America. It is a Washington monument left by […]